Rebecca Makkai is a professor teaching prose and poetry in Northwestern’s School of Professional Studies. She is the author of “The Great Believers,” which was a finalist for the 2019 Pulitzer Prize and the 2018 National Book Award and winner of the ALA Carnegie Medal, LA Times Book Prize and Stonewall Book Award. “The Great Believers” is now being optioned for TV by Amy Poehler’s production company.

The Daily: Can you tell me about “The Great Believers” overall and what it’s about?

Rebecca Makkai: It is largely set in Chicago in the 1980s in the early days of the AIDS epidemic, and it follows one man as his life both falls apart and takes on much greater meaning. And it’s also got chapters set in 2015 Paris, where a woman who lost her brother in the early days of AIDS is now dealing with everything that happened back then and searching for her estranged daughter.

TD: What inspired you to write it?

RM: It started out in a completely different place. It was originally a novel more about art history and it moved over into the AIDS epidemic. I grew up in Chicago and was born in 1978, so I was a kid in the early days of AIDS. But that means that I’ve had a lifelong interest in it ― it was one of the things going on in a culture that really shaped the way that I viewed the world.

TD: How do you feel about all the success you found through “The Great Believers” and how it is being optioned for TV?

RM: It’s been great. It’s been beyond my wildest dreams of what would have happened with the novel, both in terms of general audience response and then the literary world’s response, which would be where those awards were coming in and where reviews were coming in. It’s been out almost two years now ― it came out in 2018 in June. I think there’s the initial buzz, and that’s always very exciting, but it’s stayed a topic of conversation ― people are continuing to read it, people are continuing to talk about it. And that’s really ultimately what you’re hoping for. The awards are not unimportant in and of themselves; the awards are an indicator that people are reading the book, and when you’re getting those awards, it spurs more people to read the book, and that’s really all you care about.

TD: Did you have any expectations for the book when you first published it?

RM: I’ve been going in knowing a lot about how the industry works and knowing a lot about how a book like this might do. You know a lot about how a book is going to do in the world before it’s actually published because there’s this whole year period, after which you’ve already turned in the book and wheels are moving on cover, marketing, editing, budget and tour, and some of the earliest reviews come out months actually before the book is actually published. So in that period, you start to get a sense of what’s going to happen, and in that period, things were looking very good, so I was cautiously optimistic.

TD: Are you working on anything else right now?

RM: I’m working on my next novel, and I’m working on some short stories, and I’ve just wrapped up an oral history of this particular ACT UP demonstration, so AIDS demonstration. This is protests particularly from 1990, and I’ve just done an oral history of that for Chicago magazine, so that will be out in the April issue of Chicago magazine and I’m very happy with how that turned out.

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